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Archive for Real Life

As you may remember, last July I announced my decision to leave virtual worlds. You may have missed this due to that announcement being contained in several threads being cleaned up by Elenia, including my replies to the earlier horrible messages of hate. My decision was due to several reasons. However, I was not aware that I would hear only a week later that InWorldz servers would be shut down. But when that happened, I felt an obligation to both Elenia and to the people of InWorldz to do whatever I could to help capture as much content as possible, and help get that to the content owners.

Later, after the community contributed generously and offered such incredible support for restarting a grid on new servers, I was again drawn in to continuing to do what I could to help.

And that was to do a lot. A lot of the old procedures and files were lost, because we were so focused on trying to save the contents of about a thousand user regions. The templates we used to allocate new regions, the “places” map website, the CloudIDE, DreamShare and InShape servers, asset servers, inventory servers, and setup and configuration for the central grid services and all regions, and a lot more. We saved as much of the region content as possible, but as I’ve said before, the house was on fire and we only had time to grab a few things and get out before it was all gone.

So almost everything needed to be rebuilt, on new and different servers, new asset and database servers, and new procedures and code. And my assistance and recommendations to Elenia for product offerings on AWS, new code (including the “app” website) and opt-in policies and supporting code for ensuring strict protections for creators and their creations.

It’s been a very demanding unpaid second full-time job, on top of my very demanding regular day job. Not so much due to residents’ demands, but due to my personal desire to ensure that the work is done as fully and professionally as possible, given limited time and resources, but still a solid and expansible foundation for Elenia to use going forward.

It’s been very hard on me physically. I’m 56 years old and I can’t stay up until 3am or later every night trying to get things done, and then make it into my day job before 9am where I then lead a team working (for the Department of National Defense on a Canadian Navy base) developing server/client software that manages all networking and communications on Navy ships. If you think InWorldz or Islandz is a high-pressure, high-demand working environment, you should try a meeting with Navy commanders and NATO representatives. It should be obvious that this work duality is something I could only keep up for a limited time.

Today, I am sick at home, headaches and other problems. A lot of the things that keep me healthy have been shelved temporarily for a productivity burst that has now lasted six months.

To keep doing this also takes an emotional foundation which has been rocked repeatedly since the summer. First with the unspecified accusations from Mike, Misty and Benski that I am Very Bad for the grid, and that they won’t be part of a world were I have a role. This led to my decision in July (which has been delayed but at no time did I consider reversing that decision). There have also been a couple of somewhat toxic members of the community who try to achieve personal goals through attempts at bullying, shaming and intimidation of other residents. We are all supposed to be adults here and Elenia is trying to keep drama to a minimum and does not wish to apply discipline in these specific cases, even temporary timeouts, so that aggression takes its toll on a few targets including me. It adds to the emotional burden and adds to the questioning of life goals and how this aids my attempts to reach them. (I only have one, and that is to be happy, and this kind of completely needless conflict does not contribute to that goal and has led to me questioning why I am still here.)

I will never work in a more challenging job, be it paid or unpaid (and for the record I haven’t received a penny since May or June, instead contributing to the GoFundMe and occasionally paying for some Islandz services myself) nor will I, in spite of this effort and workload and recent accomplishments, need to face accusations that I am harming the grid or virtual worlds. I don’t need to accept this; folks, if you can only criticize when someone is volunteering to help you resolve a problem, you should take a step back to look at your own sense of entitlement.

On Monday, my 91 year old mother is having eye surgery on her only good eye. She is already today legally blind but still capable of living mostly independently. She has no short term memory, and combined with blindness, it means notes and signs to jog her memory are less than ineffective. I will be staying with her Sunday night to get her to surgery early in the morning, and all day Monday and then overnight again. My sister will take over Tuesday, and my brother has taken Wednesday off to drive from New Brunswick to take care of her that day. We will take turns, supplemented by a personal care worker when we need a break. The recovery could take 3 weeks or more, and at her age likely to be problematic in her proper care. She may need a second surgery after a few weeks. There are many care-related calls and probably moving to deal with there. So on top of everything else, I have that to take care of too.

I have been scrambling to get complex creator-filtered OAR file loading completed as quickly as humanly possible, before the surgery. That OAR work is by far the most thorough attempt to recover content ever, while also being the most thorough protection of creator content and intellectual property (copyright) protection ever.

So I really have no idea why the Creator’s Guild folks wouldn’t be thrilled with the protections implemented; it is miles beyond anything any other grid has provided, including Second Life. Except perhaps that their demands to only allow restores that don’t include any of their assets have delayed our ability to deliver the OARs, and also rendered the OARs nearly worthless in some cases. They may be angry that they will be getting exactly what they asked for, opt-in only for all assets leaving InWorldz (which includes loading on Islandz). Or perhaps just convinced by others that something was wrong, that we wouldn’t protect them, themselves victims of the propaganda campaign of character assassinations.

The negativity towards me personally may also be because Tranq abandoned InWorldz and didn’t tell anyone (especially me) and I eventually clued in and filled that leadership void without his public acknowledgement; both the leadership vacuum and my picking up the ball (with both Elenia’s and his private approval) created technical issues as well as drama. Months ago, I delegated management of the Halcyon project to Ricky, who has been instrumental in helping fill the vacuum left by Tranq there. He is also very professional and diplomatic in his approach, and is a wonderful contributor to the project. Behind me (appurist), he (kf6kjg) has been the second-most active contributor to Halcyon and related projects.

And while there are many very positive and wonderful people in the Islandz and wider virtual work community, it is also so disappointing to spend every waking moment volunteering all this work for others only to end up with so many who are unsatisfied and have the nerve to claim it isn’t enough. (Well, it’s true, it’s not enough. That’s why the work items needed to be triaged, prioritized and noted for later, and dealt with in order as time and resources permit.) But to those people I will just say that it has been far more than my fair share, and it has been far, far more than those who have been critical contributed (combined). I will judge my performance over the last six months, and last 8 years, as exceptional and look back with pride on what was accomplished.

For now, my mom’s health and needs come first, then Leanna and my family, then my full-time day job. Going forward I will continue to contribute to Islandz and Halcyon where I can, when I have time. This means advising Elenia, doing behind the scenes work (oar exports, maps, etc), enhancing the app (e. g. new user registration and region orders come to mind) and contributing advice and fixes to the Halcyon server team.

What I won’t be doing is actively participating in ongoing Islandz #General Discord discussions etc. I certainly won’t be doing anything with support issues such as region reports. (This includes private messages to me that bypass issue reporting, things like region performance, regions down, crossing issues, etc.) Elenia and Mai have been taking care of those for years, and they need to be aware of all reports, and I need to focus my limited time.

Islandz needs your support to survive. The servers are still expensive, and to even get through the month, Elenia has needed to cut a few corners. If Islandz can grow, fewer corners will need cutting, performance and features will improve. (You still need to report serious performance issues so she can check, such as sluggish walking and errors, but for percentage decreases in performance such as drops in the stats reported, know that it will get better when the number of regions grows to 80 or 100.) Amazon has server instance limits she is working on getting raised, it’s just not there yet. If you stick with it, it will get better. Unlike InWorldz on Rackspace, there’s a solid foundation now, still missing a few things, but ready to build upon.

Be kind to each other. Everyone is hurting and disappointed. Many have left and many others will leave, but this work has been applied in order to give those who stay something solid to build on.

First, it references another Slate article by David Auerbach that … actually doesn’t suggest anything with identities or verification at all. Oremus suggests the Twitter problem could be solved one of two ways: the Auerbach way (which is a dramatic change, but a practical one focusing on the actual real problem), or the Oremus way (which naively equates anonymity with trolling, sticks its head in the sand, and ignores the root problems).

Auerbach points out (I believe quite validly) that part of Twitter’s problem is the need to try to show simple growth to shareholders, since going public with the company a few years ago. And this actually varies greatly from the goal of providing the best service, and a service of value to the user.

It has been argued that revenue for social sites comes from knowing who the user is. In “real life” (RL). I disagree. Money comes from providing the identity service, not for a specific identity, not from knowing real-life information. It comes from seeing that user Aardvark Alphabet was shopping on Amazon for cordless drills or whatever, then when Aardvark Alphabet later does a search for building supplies, or some other social activity such as posting a picture of something Aardvark has built, it can pull out ads for companies selling cordless drills and insert them into his search results or any other ads Aardvark is being presented with.

It doesn’t matter who he is, or who he has authenticated as, on other sites. The idea is to be the one to provide that service that allowed him to log in as Aardvark Alphabet in the first place, or any identity. But just to be his identity provider… i.e. to also be his intelligent, targeted ad provider. And that is just for the ad revenue part of this.

But more importantly, there are many many reasons for using an alternative online persona, and any policy that doesn’t recognize that is alienating a percentage of its users. Here’s the EFF summary explaining it: https://www.eff.org/issues/anonymity If you think online pseudonyms are a bad thing, read that first, it’s not long.

This paragraph in particular is almost frightening in its self-contradition:

“From Twitter’s perspective, my plan would probably run afoul of its noble, if arguably misguided, hard-line commitment to anonymity and freewheeling speech—all without fully solving the abuse problem. It’s true that there’s great public value in a platform that allows almost anyone to be heard, even if others would like them silenced. Twitter’s importance to political dissidents, for example, is underscored every time an autocratic regime tries to censor it or shut it down.”

I’m flabbergasted at that first sentence. I’ll take a closer look at it below. Andrea (Twitter user ‏@puellavulnerata, who is a core developer for the Tor anonymity software) wrote:

“Please do explain, @WillOremus, what constitutes a ‘legitimate’ reason for pseudonymity and why you failed to notice that it isn’t pseudonymity anymore if you have to leak identifying details to prove you have one.”

If the content is not self-governed in some way by the users of the service, then Twitter has failed in its primary mission. There cannot be any kind of central authority choosing sides. As Andrea put it:

“Twitter has misconceptualized the problem as ‘good people’ vs. ‘trolls’ when it’s more like intercommunity conflict and so they’ve built tools which embed assumptions that everyone wants the same stuff filtered far more than is actually true. I don’t care about investor perception, I care about having a place to conduct my online social life that won’t get destroyed out from under me by some idiot fixation on legal identities and universalized norms of conduct. Hence, in the long run, we must kill centralized platforms like Twitter and build a replacement not dependent on investor whims.”

Whether we need to a replacement for Twitter or not, I’m not sure at this point. I do know that any real-name policy will kill Twitter. It runs contrary to its very fiber and I agree with Oremus above stating his own plan would effectively be a horrible idea: “From Twitter’s perspective, my plan would probably run afoul of its noble, if arguably misguided, hard-line commitment to anonymity and freewheeling speech—all without fully solving the abuse problem.”

To paraphase that: “My plan would ruin the very reason for Twitter’s existence, and wouldn’t actually solve the problem.” Ohhhh-kay. The cost-benefit trade-off is off the scale. So if they do that for the investors, good luck with that share price a year or two later.

I do agree with Oremus’ final two paragraphs. Twitter is different than Facebook and Google+, and needs to stay that way:

“Unfortunately, Twitter is not a public-benefit corporation. Since it decided to go public in 2013—a mistake, I believe, in retrospect—the company must answer to its shareholders, and they’ve made their top priority clear: growth. And not slow, steady growth, but rapid growth on a massive scale. They want Twitter to be more like Facebook.

“I’ve argued for years that Twitter is fundamentally different from Facebook, and we should all root for it to stay that way. Yet, for all its shortcomings as a venue for discussion, Facebook’s platform is far less conducive than Twitter’s to public abuse from unaccountable trolls. At this juncture, Twitter simply has to find a way to become a little less hostile. If it can do that, at the very least the company will become palatable to corporate suitors while better serving the majority of its users. At the same time, its data will become more valuable to advertisers. And beyond that, who knows: It might even start growing again.”

So why would a company want to be the identity service for a smaller portion of the population? Why can’t they learn from these same mistakes made by Google (e.g. Google+ and YouTube both) and others, and just let users choose how much personal information to reveal? Because they (blindly and falsely) think anonymity means trolls. So they go ahead and exclude a percentage of the world population that needs that social connectivity the most. And in addition to being a social crime against a subset of the population, it’s also not in their shareholders’ best interests. #fail

The good news is that this is just a proposal from someone writing for Slate. It’s not a good one, and it’s not a proposal from Twitter, so there’s no reason to believe Twitter would pay any attention to it. Let’s hope they stay the course on anonymity and the use of online pseudonym.

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I entered SL near the end of 2006 and by the middle of 2007 I found myself and my partner at the time not only TPing home at the end of the day, but also hopping into bed when it was time to sleep in RL, and not logging out. When we slept in RL, we slept in SL. We were online 24 hours a day. There were often direct parallels between RL and our virtual selves.

The feeling of walking back to your computer in the morning when you woke, and seeing yourself still sleeping in-world, was very comforting. Warm fuzzies.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t particularly realistic or practical. If you were online 24 hours a day, and near the end of your first year of SL, you had quite a few friends (2007 was a VERY good year in SL) and many, like yourself, were still fairly new at it. You would end up confusing and frustrating them with your lack of response to IMs, etc. If you marked yourself offline to avoid that, you might find someone accusing you of “hiding” your online status from friends. But the worth part was if you woke the next day to find you had lost your connection, or your partner had, and when you do get to see yourself in-world, you find the bed’s now-empty ball has been taken by a newbie with an over-sized freenis. Eventually it was more trouble than positive so later in 2007, we both stopped doing that. However, I still have never lost the warm fuzzies you get when you log in and see a last-logoff pic of a nice goodbye. Especially if your partner is in the last logoff pic as well. It continues your new day from where the old one left off.

Canary mentioned one of my two favourite song-writing idols, Burt Bacharach (Jimmy Webb being the other). Bacharach’s song may take artistic license with a house not being a house without someone to share it with, but I will say the general sentiment is probably true in that it sure makes a home more of a home if you do have someone else in it. I have a place to genuinely call home in RL now, although it’s just me there. Still, that means there’s room for improvement.

I went to InWorldz because SL had become too expensive to remain creative there. Every single upload cost L$. Every prim counted. I was attracted by InWorldz’ higher limits and lower costs: 45,000 prims, at one quarter the SL cost, and never any upload fees. They were very friendly and supportive of content creators. My plan was to continue in SL as normal, but use InWorldz to make the home that I wanted in SL. A whole region to myself, 75% off. I could even disable Public Access if I wanted and never suffer the evil freenis ever again, because it was mine, all mine. And I could build and build and never have to think about prim limits. I could even build that dream home on the ground and have plenty of prims to build a city at 3000m in the sky. I could take 3 regions from SL and stack them in one InWorldz region. And at a cost of 75% off.

I still had a Premium account in SL, and 512 sqm parcel for my SL Exchange / Marketplace box. My plan was to do everything in SL, including TPing home to that small parcel, then log into InWorldz to experience an improved home like before bed time. Very much like what Canary described, but with the grids flipped.

That soon changed when more and more events started happening in InWorldz, and soon my friends list was far longer there than in SL. Also, as a software developer, I wanted to contribute and volunteered my bugfixing there for about 18 months before they grew large enough to actually hire me full-time. Now it’s a fairly high-pressure job (there’s only a few staff still, and lots and lots of users), but it is what I call my “dream job”. The founders there have the 2006 SL attitude: to enable everyone to live their dreams. It is really what I miss from the good years in SL. And in addition to that, they want to help make the world a better place. Using InWorldz to help kids in Africa, using it to help encourage users to exercise, use it to help support arts and charities, and to just plain encourage people to be creative and live their dreams. There are a lot of good people there. So I have found even more than a Home.

I definitely agree with what I think Canary’s article says or implies: a home is more than just a Home, and a Home can be a real home. I need to spend more time in mine!